My Food Photo Booth

I have not been silent about all of my photography challenges.  For starters I just do not have much technical know-how.  But there are a lot of things I don't know how to do.  Or I didn't know how to do but because of an interest I learned.  Clearly, I'm interested in learning how to better photograph food (and of course now babies doing cute things that as a parent I'm convinced every one of my friends and Southern Scratch fans on Facebook are just dying to see).  But despite both my interest and real necessity to become a more skilled amateur photog, I still haven't learned all that much. So what is holding me back?

For starters, I'd say the incredibly slooooow internet service we have out here.  The speed at which it loads pages is decent and I can read and respond to email just fine.  But anything with a ton of graphics takes forever. And that is just to download.  Uploading them (like to this blog) is a nightmare. I literally start uploading a few pictures and then go and do laundry, unload the dishwasher and maybe run to the store so that I don't waste an hour sitting there while they upload.  I am not exaggerating.  Loading six pictures the other night took nearly two hours. (And of course these pictures are not all that much to look at to begin with so it truly is not worth the wait).


And video?  It is hard enough to try to load a short video to watch (we end up letting it load, go do something else and then coming back and watching it-hoping that the service hasn't briefly cut off and stopped the download in the meantime) so I can only imagine how long it would take to try to actually upload one on a blog or on our Facebook page.  Haven't even tried it. 


The second challenge is pausing long enough while I'm cooking to get a step-by-step sequence of how to prepare an item.  When I get in the kitchen I move pretty quickly and have a lot going on at once.  Stopping to get dough off my hands to photograph a step before I go right back to working with the dough and shaping it seems like the ultimate non-efficiency in the kitchen.  But this is probably the least of my food photography challenges.  After all, I really like cooking and probably remembering to take a picture is harder than actually doing it.


The next big challenge is the lighting and reflection in our house.  In my kitchen I do most of my prep on a stainless steel table.  The light reflection never works.  So I'll try to attempt to dodge it by laying down a cloth or some other means of "staging" but that doesn't help all that much because we have crazy drop panel fluorescent lights in most of the main room (our main level is one huge room and then a hallways with  bedrooms/1bath and then one big open space with a bathroom in the basement).  But while there are huge fluorescent light panels gracing each of the room "sections" there isn't one in the kitchen.  All I have is an oven light and then one over my sink and they are at different heights.


The last challenge is the whole house itself.  Right now for instance we have about a third of the wall space taped off at the bottom to paint.  Another third is mainly the kitchen/dining area which usually has the Bumbo waiting to be wiped down, some dishes in the sink, etc.  The last third is currently where all the furniture from the walls being painted has ended up.  It also has our two desks and a Pack n' Play where we've been corralling baby girl some from trying to rip up and eat the newspaper from the painting project.  (Thankfully Kip told me the News-Reporter uses soy based ink!).


So even taking pictures of baby girl I wince because although I think she looks adorable wearing her supper, the background is screaming "Disaster! Disaster!"  You can only imagine now trying to take food shots with this background.  Strawberry pie or some decadent chocolate cake just do not have the same "wow" factor when you see linoleum that desperately needs to be replaced in the background.


SO ENOUGH WHINING about how life isn't always perfect, huh?


It was time to do something about all of this.  So the past few dietetic interns I have had spend time with me have all in some way or another contributed to helping me improve the blog. (Thanks Brooke, Julie & Allie!) These girls are all in their dietetic internship with the Augusta Area Dietetic Internship based out of University Hospital.  And they were all just fabulous.  When the last girl was here she mentioned that another intern, Allie, was really interested in photography.  So I did what every preceptor would do and told Allie that if she would spend time with me I had a great project for her and that I also needed her to give me a crash course with my camera. 


Luckily, she agreed.  Even though she already had a rotation this week and even though it involved her driving all the way to Washington for a day. (I'm pretty sure the program is supposed to work the other way around where I teach her something but every teacher would admit you learn from your students too, right?  And I did teach her how to quiet a fussy baby in a restaurant today by providing plenty of cereal and letting them chew on your car keys.)



So here is the little project we worked on today...

Get it?  It's a light tent.  For food!  Yeah!!


Allie found a ton of blogs for where to find instructions and we ended up mainly following this one here. 
She emailed me a list of supplies to pick up and then we put it together pretty quickly this morning. (I was a little daunted by the task to find all the PVC pieces but it was actually really easy-and luckily I vaguely remembered tagging along on a trip with Reid there one time when the water pipe busted so I knew where they kept the stuff).

 So here are a couple of pictures of her (with our primed paneling in the background-finally!) marking the PVC pipe...vital Registered Dietitian skills to have.

Notice the primed wood paneling in the background! Yeah!

My text to Reid this morning: "Honey where are the PVC cutters?"

And here are a couple of practice pictures of various veggies from our garden (garlic from Lazy Willow).  The tent is designed so that it can fold up flat and you can switch the backdrops just by clipping on whatever fabric/background you want.  (I wonder if there is a faux paneling one in case for old times sake?)  Then the light is filtered (?) by covering the PVC frame with a white sheet (in this case a bed sheet that had a hole in it..we cut it in half and then I hemmed the edge to give it a slightly more professional look.  Then you just clip on lights with "daylight" bulbs screwed in.  And voila-you have this mini perfect natural daylight adjustable food photo booth thing.  I thought Allie was a genius.

Lazy Willow Farm garlic, Tonda Nizza and Benning's Green Tint Scallop squash.

After we finished building the tent we went outside and Allie gave me some more hands on camera lessons.  I learned that my camera actually has a thing called "White Balance" and you can change it to fit whatever lighting you're shooting in (it even has a "fluorescent" setting!!  Score for our house!)  You can also change the thing called "ISO sensitivity" to control how much light is allowed in the photo.  I think I've figured out somewhat what the "Continuous" shooting options are on the menu and the "Color" options are pretty fun to play with (to take a picture in Black and White or Sepia, etc...I always thought you did that with the photo editing tool after you took the picture.) 


So while everything I learned today is probably the most basic you can get, I still feel 100% more confident in my ability to take semi-decent pictures of whatever I'm whipping up in the kitchen.  I also feel like I've whetted my appetite for really learning more about my camera, lighting, food staging, etc.   And since you eat with your eyes first, great pictures of vegetables may even be more important than knowing how many calories are in them.  (Since the point is for all of us to eat more of them, right?)



And the really, really great news?  Last week a woman stopped by our house to scout out where the fiber optic line is going to go! I'm not completely sure what that means but I'm pretty certain it = faster internet speed.  Thank goodness!  (Although I might get less laundry done...)